"We in the West have always been uncomfortable with
Islam. We have tolerance for, even interest in , Buddhism and Oriental
religions, but Islam-a faith followed by one sixth of the world
population-seems rooted in fanaticism and vaguely threatening. Many of us
think of Christianity as standing for things, and of Islam as
standing against things."

David Lamb

The Arabs

"Millions of people.....of Europe and America have
forgotten all about Islam....They take for granted that it is just a foreign
religion which will not concern them. It is, in fact, the most formidable
and persistent enemy which our civilization has had....The story is by no
means over; the power of Islam may at any moment re-arise."

Hilaire Belloc 1938

"Here is the West, then: after having sown injustice,
servitude and tyranny, it is bewildered, and writhes in its contradictions;
all that is necessary is for a powerful Eastern hand to reach out, in the
shadow of the standard of God on which will float the pennant of the Koran,
a standard help up by the army of the faith, powerful and solid; and the
world under the banner of Islam will again find calm and peace."

Hassan al-Banna 1946

"Let me give you some advice, Mr. Shah! Dear Mr. Shah,
I advise you to desist....I don't want the people to offer up thanks if your
(foreign) masters should decide one day that you must leave. I don't want
you to become like your father.....During World War II the Soviet Union,
Britain and America invaded Iran and occupied our country. The property of
the people was exposed and their honor was imperiled. But God knows,
everyone was happy the Pahlavi had gone!....Don't you know that if one day
some uproar occurs and the tables are turned, none of these people around
you will be your friends."

(letter from Ayatollah Khomeini to the Shaw of Iran 1963)

"...Whether we regard the word "Islam" from
its lexical or religious aspect, we find that it does not refer to a
specific person, in the way Buddhism refers to the Buddha or the Zoroastrian
faith to Zoroaster; it does not refer, either, to a specific people in the
way Judaism refers to a specific people; nor does it denote a certain region
or country, as do yet other religions. A religion which is related, or
refers to a certain person, or people, or region, is necessarily limited in
time by the survival of that person or people, and limited in space by their
geographical location. In contrast to this the word "Islam" knows
no such limiting time or space, person or people. So divorced is the word
from any specific location that in considering it we are taken directly to
an unlimited sphere which extends beyond the bounds of the globe. Nor is it
limited in history by the era of the Mohammedan mission."

-Abdel Hameed Mahumud

"Western attacks on Islam and negative media
stereotypes of Muslims help confirm Islamist paranoia about a supposed
Western plot to eradicate Islam. Some self-appointed Western 'experts' also
play into the hands of the most extreme Islamists through their excessive
characterization of Islam's uniqueness as a religion. Islamists, too, would
like their fellow Muslims to believe that Islam is really too self-contained
to adjust to modernity or democracy."

"If any religion has a chance of ruling over England,
nay Europe, within the next hundred years, it can only be Islam. I have
always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation, because of its
wonderful vitality. It is the only religion, which appears to me, to possess
the assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence, which can
make its appeal to every age. I believe, that if a man like Muhammad were to
assume the dictatorship of the modern world, he would succeed in solving its
problem, in a way that would bring it much needed peace and happiness."

-George Bernard Shaw

"For an intelligent, educated Westerner to
convert to Islam is an act of mental suicide, a self-conscious infantilism
born of the willful ignorance that refuses to look facts in the face, the
adult equivalent of the rebellious teenager seeking a way to offend by
choosing the antithesis of his or her parents' cultural values. The choice
between Islam and the critical skepticism that has made the modern world is
a choice between a return to the womb, the essence of the mystical
experience, and going forward into the future without guide or refuge; if
courage is the first of the virtues, the explorer has more than the
stay-at-home. Traditionalism, the deliberate and knowing return to ways of
thinking and living long abandoned, as urged by Guenon and his followers in
the mystical-romantic school of Islamic studies, is a self-contradiction
that even those immersed in a traditional world were self-aware enough to
recognize."

Iben Al-Rawandi

Islamic Mysticism: A Secular Perspective

"From the confines of Jerusalem and from the city of
Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth. An accursed race, a race
utterly alienated from God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and
depopulated them by the sword, plundering, and fire."

Pope Urban II Council of Clermont 1095 A.D.

"The Saracens do great honour to the Temple of Our Lord,
saying that it is a very holy place. When they enter it, they take off their
shoes and kneel often with great reverence. When my companions and I saw them
do so, we too took off our shoes and thought it was the more reasonable that
we Christians should do as much worship and honour to God as unbelievers
did."

Sir John Mandeville

Book: "A History of Christian-Muslim Relations" by
Hugh Goddard

"Toleration of Muslims who resided outside Christendom
under their own government, even negotiation with them, was liable to be
suspected as treasonable to the Western Church. A well-known example is the
accusation of treachery against Raymund of Tripoli, for allowing al-Afdal's
party to cross his territory when war was impending; not only was there
contemporary criticism, but Raymund and others of the opposition to the
Lusignans passed into legend as traitors to Christendom. Richard I was suspected
because of his negotiations with al-'Adil; in this connection even
his friends reported that 'it was a common saying that a friendship with the
Gentiles was a heinous offence.' Balian d'Ibelin feared to be described by
the Imperial party as fonder of Muslims than of Christians. Among the crimes
of Frederick II was his having had' the name of Muhammad cried in the
Temple'; that is, he had agreed that the Qubbat as-Sakhrah, built as a
mosque and, except during the short period of Latin rule, used as one,
should continue so to be used, at a time when he had no option, because
there was no possibility at all of stopping Islamic possession of it. When
the Templars were to be accused of horrifying crimes, secret agreements with
the Muslims and a willingness to secede to Islam were included among them.
From another side, the paintings of the Jerusalem and 'Akka scriptoria
testify, as Buchthal has recently shown, to the isolation of the Latin
Kingdom from its Islamic surroundings. With the Crusades, the world had
moved far from Gregory VII's direct negotiations of 1078, his personal
recommendation of protégés to a Muslim ruler."

Norman Daniel

Islam and the West

"They received us indeed like angels of God, in their
schools and colleges and monasteries, and in their churches or synagogues
(i.e. in mosques), and their homes; and we diligently studied their religion
and their works; and we were astounded how in so false a religion could be
found works of such perfection. We refer here briefly to some of the works
of perfection of the Muslims, rather to shame the Christians than to commend
the Muslims. Who will not be astounded, if he carefully considers how great
is the concern of these very Muslims for study, their devotion in prayer,
their pity for the poor, their reverence for the name of God and the
prophets and the Holy Places, their sobriety in manners, their hospitality
to strangers, their harmony and love for each other?"

Riccoldo

Let me tell you 'bout A-hab the A-rab, the sheik of the
burning sand. He had emeralds and rubies just a-dripping off of him, and a
ring on every finger of his hands.

-popular 1960s song by Ray Stevens

"Probably no ethnic or religious group has been so
constantly and massively disparaged in the media as the Arab over the past
two decades. Being Arab is a liability everywhere but in the Arab homelands,
for virtually everywhere else the Arab is stereotyped in negative terms. When
a school in suburban Washington, D.C. , held a Halloween costume party not
long ago, eight of the children showed up dressed as Arabs. Their
accessories included toy guns, rubber knives, oil cans and money bags. Even Sesame
Street, the widely acclaimed American children's television show, once
used an Arab figure to portray the concept of danger. And in 1978, when U.S.
federal agents posing as wealthy Arabs from Oman and Lebanon offered bribes
to congressmen in return for political favors, they called their undercover
operation ABSCAM (for Arab scam) Few people were offended, but I wonder what
the public reaction would been had they named their operation Jewscam or
blackscam. No matter. The Arab is fair game, particularly on television.

David Lamb

The Arabs

"The intellectual-and thereby the rational-foundation
of Islam results in the average Muslim having a curious tendency to believe
that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of
pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by
elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a
good conscience quite exceeds the Muslim's imagination, precisely because
Islam coincides in his mind with the irresistible logic of things."

Frithjof Schuon

"The first world religion to show any
enthusiasm for commerce was Islam. The Prophet Muhammad had been engaged in
trade, and his first wife was an important businesswoman in the very
mercantile city of Mecca. The Koran said, 'Merchants are the messengers of
this world and God's trustees on earth.' The markets are God's tables,'
added Al-Ghazali. The Muslims were the first to produce a book in praise of
commerce , The Beauties of Trade, by Ja'far b. Ali ad-Dimishqi, in
the twelfth century, arguing that trade is 'the best of all gainful
employments and the most conducive to happiness;. Islam's extraordinarily
rapid expansion over half the globe was a commercial as well as a religious
victory, the European Dark Ages, and a visit to them was the equivalent of
tasting the delights of Paris five centuries later. "

Theorodre Zeldin

An Intimate History of Humanity

"But escaping from the shadow of the Arab stereotyping is difficult. Newspaper editors still feel more
comfortable dealing with
the Middle East from the Israeli perspective. The public still treats Arabs
as objects of curiosity and ridicule. Politicians, fearful of offending
American Jews, still consider an association with Arab Americans a potential
onus. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Walter Mondale responded to
Jewish pressure by returning five thousand dollars in contributions he had
received from four Arab Americans. A fifth contribution was returned to a
woman simply because her name sounded Arabic. In 1986 , James
Abourezk, a former U.S. senator of Lebanese descent who is chairman of the
American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, sent a personal check of one
hundred dollars to help Joseph Kennedy, the son of Robert F. Kennedy, in his
Massachusetts campaign for Congress. One of Kennedy's aides, Steve Rothstein,
returned the contribution, saying it was too "controversial." When
Vice President George Bush toured the Middle East in 1986 as prelude to
seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he brought along a private
film crew to film him in Israel. The crew did not accompany him on the
remainder of the trip to Egypt and Jordan because, as one official put it
"There is nothing to be gained schmoozing with the Arabs."

David Lamb

The Arabs

"History makes it clear, however, that the legend of fanatical
Muslims sweeping through the world and forcing Islam at the point of the
sword upon conquered races is one of the most fantastically absurd myths
that historians have ever repeated."

De Lacy O'Leary

"People seem to take it for granted that an alien society is dangerous,
if not hostile, and the spasmodic outbreak of warfare between Islam and
Christendom throughout history has been one manifestation of this.
Apparently, under the pressure of their sense of danger, whether real or
imagined, a deformed image of their enemy's beliefs takes shape in men's
minds. By misapprehension and misrepresentation, a notion of the ideas and
beliefs of one society can pass into the accepted myths of another society,
in a form so distorted that its relation to the original facts is sometimes
barely discernible. Doctrines that are the expression of the spiritual
outlook of an enemy are interpreted ungenerously and with prejudice, and
even the facts are modified-and in good faith- to suit the interpretation.
In this way is constituted a body of belief about what another group of
people believes. A 'real truth' is identified: this is something that
contrasts with what the enemy say they believe; they must not be allowed to
speak for themselves. This doctrine about doctrine is widely repeated, and
confirmed by repetition in slightly varying forms. The experts, perhaps
because being close to the facts is a constant stimulus to their zeal,
contribute most to the process and they are themselves of course wholly
convinced by it.

Norman Daniel

Islam and the West

"Islam revolutionized the Arabs within a short 23
years. It raised them from their decadent state to complete mental and
social advancement. Idol worship was replaced with the reverence of God
almighty. Moral perversion was dislodged by virtue and decency. Within a
matter of decades impoverished, illiterate desert dwellers became the
world's foremost leaders in spirituality as well as in the sciences and
civilization. Plus, they maintained that power for hundreds of years. While
modern historians describe the societal impact of various revolutions and
cultural revivals, such as the Renaissance and French Revolution, this
change in society was the most profound ever recorded in history. The Arabs
were rapidly transformed from the depths of moral and intellectual
stagnation into the models of decency, clemency, sophistication, and
scholarship. What's more, this revolution surged far beyond the Arabian
peninsula, influencing humanity globally."

Dr. Kasem Khaleel

The Arab Connection

"A Muslim is not allowed to start violence, but he is allowed to
answer back with violence if someone else starts."

-Dr. Hassan al-Turabi

Islam states: "Blessed are they who are blameless as respects women,
who are charitable, who talk not vainly, who are humble, who observe their
pledges and covenants, who guard their prayers."

"The light of these (Islamic) universities shone far beyond the
Moslem World, and drew students from east and west. At Cordoba, in
particular, there were great numbers of Christian students, and the
influence of Arab philosophy coming by way of Spain upon universities of
Paris, Oxford, and North Italy and upon Western European thought was very
considerable indeed."

H.G. Wells

Outline of History

"Europe has continued to keep out of sight our scientific
obligations to the Mussalmans. Surely they cannot be much longer
hidden."

-Rev. G. Margoliouth

"History as such has never held much interest for most Muslims. What
is important about historical events is simply that God works through them.
The significant events of the past are those that have a direct impact on
people's present situation and their situation in the next world. From this
point of view, the one event of overwhelming significance is God's
revelation of the Koran. The actual historical and social circumstances in
which it was revealed relate to an extremely specialized field of learning that
few scholars ever bothered with. The fact that Western historians have
devoted a great deal of attention to this issue says something about modern
perceptions of what is real and important, but it tells us nothing about
Muslim perceptions of the Koran's significance."

W.C. Chittick and S. Murata

The Vision of Islam

"Islam has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of
millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished environment over a
fourteen-hundred-year period."

Carleton Stevens Coon (1951)

Thus anyone who believes in the Qur’anic vision has to work tirelessly
and fearlessly to create a just society, where everyone is free and human
dignity not crushed; where no one is a tyrant and others tyrannized; where
no one is master and others slaves; where no one exploits and others are not
exploited; where freedom of conscience and freedom to act are not
compromised. That will be the Qur’anic society."

Dr. Asghar Ali

"The Qur'an has no parallel outside Islam. Christians have sometimes
seen it as equivalent to the Bible. They have not always realized that the
Qur'an describes itself (and previous revelations also, though not word for
word) as copied from a heavenly prototype, so that it is really unlike
anything known to Christianity. Still less have they understood that it is
believed to be the uncreated Word of God. This doctrine, which was arrived
at comparatively late in the development of the consensus of Islamic
opinion, was yet generally accepted two centuries before the period that
concerns us. The Qur'an in Islam is very nearly what Christ is in
Christianity: the Word of God, the whole expression of revelation. For the
most Bible-loving, Protestant or Catholic, the Bible derives its
significance from Christ; but Muhammad derives his from the Qur'an. In their
failure to realize this, Latin's persistently contrasted Christ and
Muhammad, and nothing marks more clearly the distance between Islamic and
European thought."

Norman Daniel

Islam and the West: The Making of an Image

"Islam is politics or it is nothing."

The Ayatollah Khomeini

"We shall export our revolution to the whole world: Until the cry "Allah
Akbar" resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle. There
will be Ji'had."

Ayatollah Khomeini

"The governments of the world should know that Islam cannot be defeated.
Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world, and Islam and the
teachings of the Koran will prevail all over the world."

Ayatollah Khomeini

"One cannot grasp the inspiring spirit of the Quran,
unless one begins to put its message into practice, for the Quran is neither
a book of abstract ideas and theories which may be studied in an easy chair
nor is it a book of religious enigmas which may be unraveled in monasteries
and universities. It is a Book that has been sent down to invite people to start
a movement and to lead its followers and direct their activities toward the
achievement of its mission. One has, therefore, to go to the battlefield of
life to understand its real meaning."

Abul A'ala Maududi

" The number of the campaigns which he led in person during the
last ten years of his life is twenty-seven, in nine of which there was hard
fighting. The number of the expeditions which he planned and sent out under
other leaders is thirty-eight. He personally controlled every detail of organization,
judged every case and was accessible to every supplicant. In those ten years he
destroyed idolatry in Arabia; raised woman from the status of a chattel to
complete legal equality with man; effectually stopped the drunkenness and
immorality which had til then disgraced the Arabs; made men in love with faith,
sincerity and honest dealing; transformed tribes who had been for centuries
content with ignorance into a people with the greatest thirst for knowledge; and
for the first time in history made universal human brotherhood a fact and
principle of common law. And his support and guide in all that work was the
Koran. "

(introduction to the Glorious Koran by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall)

"No religion in History spread so rapidly as Islam."

James A. Michener

"It is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome,
confused jumble, crude, incondite. Nothing but a sense of duty could carry
any European through the Koran' puts succinctly what must indeed be the
first impression of any reader. But years of close study confirm his further
judgment that in it 'there is a merit quite other than the literary one. If
a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art
and authorcraft are of small account to that."

(Carlyle on the Koran)

"Islam maintains itself in existence in the modern
world by refusing to look critically at its origins and by a systematic
program of indoctrination of the young whereby their critical faculties are
neutralized before they have a chance to develop. Forcing five-year-olds to
learn the Koran by heart is an aspect of child abuse curiously overlooked by
concerned liberals. As R.E. Burns has observed, "The rote recitation of
the Qur'an by young boys for hours at a time has a mentally unbalancing
effect upon them. " The inner experiences that may result from such
activities, which some would regard as their validation, are no more than
might be expected from being a participant in a particular religious milieu;
the argument for Islam from the evidence of religious experience fares no
better in its case than in any other, even at the abstract level of fana
and baqa."

Ibn Al-Rawandi

Islamic Mysticism: A Secular Perspective

"He (Mohammed) who, standing alone, braved for years the hatred of
his people is the same who was never the first to withdraw his hand from
another's clasp; the beloved of children, who never passed a group of little
ones without a smile from his wonderful eyes and a kind word for them, sounding
all the kinder in that sweet-toned voice....He was one of those happy few who
have attained the supreme joy of making one great truth their very life-spring.
He was the messenger of the one God; and never to his life's end did he forget
who he was, or the message which was the marrow of his being. He brought his
tidings to his people with a grand dignity sprung from the consciousness of his
high office, together with a most sweet humility whose roots lay in the
knowledge of his own weakness."

Stanley Lane Poole

"He lived in great humility, performing the most menial tasks with
his own hands; he kindled the fire, swept the floor, milked the ewes,
patched his own garments and cobbled his own shoes. He labored for the
amelioration of the slaves' lot, liberating any that were presented to
him."

Bertram Thomas

"The friend I most emulate is a Muslim unencumbered; a man of small
family, and little money, a performer of prayers and a perfect worshipper of
God in private, one who is unknown, and hath enough to supply his wants, and
when he dieth, he will leave a few women to cry for him, and few
legacies."

Mohammed (Sayings of Mohammed)

"The inhabitants of Mecca are distinguished by many excellent and
noble activities and qualities, by their beneficence to the humble and weak,
and by their kindness to strangers. When any of them makes a feast he begins
by giving food to the religious devotees who are poor and without resources,
inviting them first with kindness and delicacy…..The Meccans are very
elegant and clean in their dress, and most of them wear white garments ,
which you always see fresh and snowy….The Meccan women are extraordinarily
beautiful and very pious and modest….they visit the mosque every Thursday
night, wearing their finest apparel; and the whole sanctuary is saturated
with the smell of their perfume."

Ibn Battutah (in 1326)

"Islam is the religion of the Universe, Islam is the destiny of
mankind. That destiny must come to fulfillment sooner or later. Muslims carry
a great responsibility on their shoulders in that respect, and the earlier
they awaken to it the better."

Prof. Dr. C. Antonoff

Allah has bought from the Umma-the true believers of Islam-their
selves and their substance in return for Paradise; they fight in the way of
Allah, killing and being killed. Their promise is written in the blood of
the moon. Rejoice in the bargain. That is surely the supreme triumph.

The quest of knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim….verily the men
of knowledge are the inheritors of the Prophets….seek knowledge from the
cradle to the grave."

Al Azhar in Cairo-early University Madarasa-Qur’anic Education

"The real issue at stake here between Muslims and Christians is
whether or not worldly success can legitimately crown religious achievement.
And the Koran does presuppose that religion is not allergic to worldly
triumph."

Shabbir Akhtar

The Final Imperative

"These Arabs do not only avoid fighting Christianity, they even
endorse our religion, they honour our priests and holy men and donate gifts
to monasteries and churches."

(Head of the Nestorian Church AD 650)

In the Garden of Myrtles; Studies in Early Islamic Mysticism

"Within a week, I had joined Islam, everything became normal and
automatic. I prayed five times a day and began to read the Koran with what
was available, that is, in French, although really you can only fully
understand it in Arabic, literary Arabic, which is much lovelier than Arab
dialect. The Koran is the instructions God our Creator gave us for living on
earth. When you buy a washing machine, if you don’t have the manufacturer’s
instructions, you can’t get it to work properly. The Koran is the same….The
veil was part of my duty as a Muslim, it was natural to wear it, it didn’t
bother me at all."

Scherazade (the teenage French girl who caused great controversy in
France over wearing a veil to school)

At Christmas 1993, Scherazade took part in the UOIF gathering at Le
Bourget, where she spoke to great acclaim; describing the incidents leading
to her exclusion, she declared: ‘Even if they put the sun in my right hand
and the moon in my left hand, I would not take off my veil.’ As she said
later, ‘When I’d finished speaking, even the men were crying. The
beginning of the sentence about the sun and the moon was the words the
Prophet spoke on the day people from Mecca came to ask him to give up his
religion."

(official French statistics show that as soon as a mosque is built in
France, the number of thieves and drug addicts goes down)

"When Scherazade the Muslim wore her veil, and when the head teacher
ordered her to remove it, they represented in real terms the history of
Islam against its enemies, Good against Evil, tolerance and mercy against
racism and violence….Her friend Sandra converted to Islam, along with Rose
and Caroline; Fatima, Aicha, Bathina and Naoual returned to Islam, whereas
before they were Muslims only in name; truly something beautiful for those
who appreciate beauty, and something terrible for those who prefer to remain
in darkness….."

Gilles Kepel

Allah in the West*

"The veil, so overlaid with symbolic meaning for Westerners, is for
Yemeni women just another item of dress. If it is not essential as
protection against the cold, then neither are stockings, bras or neckties.
Casual Western observers, for whom the black sharshaf is a dehumanizer
and who equate the veil with a gag, are allowing an obsession with symbolism
to pull the wool over their own eyes. Underlying the use of hair-or
face-coverings there are, of course, Arab-Islamic concepts of honor and
modesty which the West does not share or has lost. The question of what
to conceal-face, breasts, ankles, the legs of a grand piano-is not a
question of sense but of sensibilities. The Turkey merchant Sir Henry Blount
wrote in the seventeenth century of the Turks that they live 'by another
kind of civilite, different from ours, but no less pretending'. His message
has yet to get across. The veil is indeed a potent symbol, but a symbol of
the unwillingness or inability of the West to understand the Arab world. The
Iron Curtain has been and gone; the Muslim curtain still hangs, and probably
always will."

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Yemen: The Unknown Arabia

"In fact the modern Islamic revival has chosen to focus its
energies on social works: health clinics, schools, orphanages and the like. This
aspect of it is entirely veiled from consumers of the Western media, who only
know the Islamic movement from some of its political manifestations. Baffled by
its rhetoric, and incensed by the 'behavior of a small minority of activists,
Western public opinion views it as as a force of aberrant evil which endangers
the progress of 'modern' (a euphemism for 'Western') values. Christians must
understand that this image is the precise opposite of the Muslim perception,
which sees Westernization as the harbinger of cultural extinction and cultural
breakdown, a malign cancer imposed by force, first by Christian and
post-Christian armies, and later by military regimes presiding over a Muslim
world whose indigenous political processes have been deconstructed by colonial
policy, whose territory stands divided by national boundaries not drawn by
Muslim hands, and where the still devout masses are held down by small
Westernized elites with little but contempt for indigenous culture and values.
It should unsurprising that these masses are instinctively hostile to such an
order."

Shabbir Akhtar

The Final Imperative

"We believe that because we are on the side of truth, then we are on
the side of God. And because God is with us, then everything shall be in our
favor."

Saddam Hussein

"We have in reality, then, no choice but to destroy those systems of
government that are corrupt in themselves and also entail the corruption of
others, and to overthrow all treacherous, corrupt, oppressive, and criminal
regimes. This is the duty that all Moslems must fulfill, in every one of the
Moslem countries first, and then throughout the infidel West, in order to
achieve the triumph of our revolution and to garner the blessing of
Allah."

Ayatollah khomeini

"In 2001, one of the things that puzzled many people,
especially in the West, was Osama bin Laden's frequent reference to the
suffering of the past eighty years. One can see why, say, fifty
years might have made more sense-the Israeli state was established in 1948, and
thousands of Palestinians were evicted from their ancestral homelands following
the defeat of the Arab armies both that year and in 1967. But to bin Laden and
his fellow followers of the more extreme salafiyya version of Islam-the
kind that wants to recreate the pure Islamic and Arab-led Islam of the seventh
century-the defeat and betrayal of 1918 was the real disaster."

In the Islamist view, the map of the Middle East as we know
it now is entirely the result of the invasion of that region by Britain and
France, and their plans for it. It is not the map that would have been drawn if
the Ottoman Empire had imploded from within."

Book: "Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power" by Jonathan
Bloom & Sheila Blair

Book: "A Literary History of the Arabs"...R.A. Nicholson

Book: "History of the Arabs." by..P.K. Hitti

Book: "The Arabs in History." bu..B. Lewis

Book: "The Arab Mind, Revised Edition" by Raphael Patar

Book: "The Arabian Connection" by Dr. Kasem Khaleel

Book: "The Preaching of Islam" bu...Sir T. W. Arnold

Book: "Islam, Economics, and Society" by Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi

Book: Mystical Elements in Mohammed...by J.C. Archer

Book: "Jihad" by Gilles Kepel

Book: "A Study in Tolerance" As Practiced by Muhammad and His
immediate Successors" by Adolph L. Wismar

Book: "The Receding Shadow of the Prophet: The Rise and Fall of Radical
Political Islam" by Ray Takeyh & Nikdask Gvosdev

Book: "The Malady of Islam" by Abdelwahab Meddeb

Book: "The Miseducation of the West: How Schools and the Media distort
Our Understanding of the Islamic World" Ed by Joe L. Kincheloe &
Shirley R. Steinberg

See: International Arabic Encyclopedia. a monumental compendium of
30 bound volumes. as a guide to the history, religion, culture, science,
literature, medicine, ethnography and other intellectual and spiritual
achievements of the Arabic and Islamic nations. Published by HRH Prince
Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia